Giorgio Vasari

(click to enlarge)
Vasari, self-portrait, oil painting; in the Uffizi, Florence (credit: SCALA/Art Resource, New York)

(born July 30, 1511, Arezzo — died June 27, 1574, Florence) Italian painter, architect, and writer. Though he was a prolific painter in the Mannerist style, he is more highly regarded as an architect (he designed the Uffizi Palace, now the Uffizi Gallery), but even his architecture is overshadowed by his writings. His Lives of the Most Eminent Architects, Painters, and Sculptors (1550) offers biographies of early to late Renaissance artists. His style is eminently readable and his material is well researched, though when facts were scarce he did not hesitate to fill in the gaps. In his view, Giotto had revived the art of true representation after its decline in the early Middle Ages, and succeeding artists had brought that art progressively closer to the perfection achieved by Michelangelo. The work's second edition (1568) has proved an invaluable resource for art historians.

For more information on Giorgio Vasari, visit Britannica.com.

Giorgio Vasari (1511-1570) was an Italian painter, architect, and author of "The Lives of the Most Celebrated Painters, Sculptors, and Architects." His book is the foundation of modern art historiography and the prototype for all biographies of artists.

Giorgio Vasari was born on July 30, 1511, in Arezzo. According to his own account, he was apprenticed as a boy to Andrea del Sarto in Florence. He apparently suffered at the hands of Andrea's wife, to judge from the waspish references to her in his life of Andrea. Vasari's career is well documented, the fullest source of information being the autobiography added to the 1568 edition of his Lives.

Vasari had an extremely active career, but much of his time was spent as an impresario devising decorations for courtly festivals and similar ephemera. He fulsomely praised the Medici family for forwarding his career from childhood, and much of his work was done for Cosimo I, Grand Duke of Tuscany. Vasari was a prolific painter in the mannerist style and was also active as an architect, his talents in the latter profession being superior to those he displayed as a painter. He supervised the building of Pope Julius III's Villa Giulia near Rome, but his masterpiece is the reconstruction of the Uffizi picture gallery in Florence (from 1560), originally the offices of the grandducal administration.

The Lives

Vasari's Lives was published in Florence in 1550; it was revised and enlarged in 1568. He venerated Michelangelo to the point of idolatry. In the latter years of Michelangelo's life Vasari came to know him quite well, and for this reason the two versions of his biography of Michelangelo are of the greatest importance as a contemporary assessment.

The tradition of such biographies goes back to antiquity; technical treatises on the arts were also written in classical times, Pliny the Elder and Vitruvius having produced two celebrated examples. As early as the time of Lorenzo Ghiberti there had been an attempt to imitate classical prototypes by writing on earlier and contemporary artists, and Ghiberti, in his Commentaries (ca. 1447-1455), also wrote the earliest autobiography by a modern artist.

During the late 15th and early 16th centuries similar treatises were projected and written, and Vasari knew and used some of these earlier works. What distinguishes the first edition of his Lives is the fact that it is far fuller (and better written) than any of its predecessors or potential rivals. As Vasari says himself, he wrote as an artist for other artists, with knowledge of technical matters.

The book opens with long introductions on the history and technique of painting, sculpture, and architecture, as practiced in Italy since the Dark Ages, and then proceeds to a chronological series of lives of the great revivers of painting (Giotto), sculpture (the Pisani), and architecture (Arnolfo di Cambio), reaching a climax in the life of Michelangelo, the master of all three arts, who was then 75 years old. Briefly, the plan of the book was to show how Italian - and specifically Tuscan - artists had revived the glories of classical art late in the 13th century, reaching a crescendo in Michelangelo. Vasari is extremely partisan in that Venetians such as Giorgione and Titian are not given the prominence they deserve; and he also shows an uneasy awareness that if Michelangelo had reached perfection only decline could follow.

Vasari took great care to gather material on his numerous journeys, and, more than any of his predecessors, he looked at works of art. On the other hand, his reverence for factual truth was less than would be required of a modern historian, and he was unable to resist an amusing anecdote. This gives his book a liveliness and directness which has ensured its continued popularity independent of its historical importance.

In 1568 Vasari produced a second edition, much larger than the original and containing a great many alterations, particularly in the earlier lives. It also has many new biographies of living (or recently dead) artists, so it is an essential source for Vasari's contemporaries. He gives more space to non-Florentine artists and even mentions one or two non-Italians.

The most important changes are in the life of Michelangelo, who had died in 1564. Part of the revision of Vasari's earlier life was occasioned by the publication, in 1553, of the Life of Michelangelo, written by Ascanio Condivi, a pupil of Michelangelo, and probably partly dictated by the master. The versions by Vasari and Condivi give us, therefore, a unique contemporary picture of the life and works of the greatest Italian artist of the age.

It is almost impossible to imagine the history of Italian art without Vasari, so fundamental is his Lives. It is the first real and autonomous history of art both because of its monumental scope and because of the integration of the individual biographies into a whole.

Further Reading

There are several English translations of Vasari's Lives, in whole or in part, the best selection being that translated by George Bull as The Lives of the Artists (1965). For biographical information on Vasari see Einar Rud, Vasari's Life and Lives (1963).

Additional Sources

Boase, T. S. R. (Thomas Sherrer Ross), 1898-1974., Giorgio Vasari: the man and the book, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979.

Italian architect, author, and painter. His Le Vite de' più eccellenti architetti, pittori, e scultori italiani (Lives of the Most Eminent Italian Architects, Painters, and Sculptors) was published in 1550 and is a prime source of information on Renaissance architecture as well as having been a key document in creating perceptions about the period. An expanded edition came out in 1568. As an architect he made an important contribution to the designs for the Villa Giulia, Rome (1551–5), vetted by Michelangelo and realized by Vignola and Ammannati. In 1555 he settled in Florence to work for Duke Cosimo I de' Medici (1519–74). There, he created his masterpiece, the Uffizi, the Government Offices of the Tuscan State (1560–80s), with façades influenced by Bramante's Belvedere in the Vatican, Michelangelo's Biblioteca Laurenziana, Florence, and Peruzzi's Palazzo Massimo alle Colonne, Rome. The Uffizi buildings enclose a long piazzetta terminated at the river end by a loggia incorporating a serliana, and was completed by Buontalenti, who designed several Mannerist details, including the Porta delle Suppliche.

At Arezzo Vasari designed the Church of Santi Fiora e Lucilla (1564–86) on a plan resembling that of San Marco, Venice, and the handsome loggia in the Piazza Grande (1570–96). He also carried out several major alterations of church interiors following the Council of Trent (1545–63) which required unimpeded views of the high-altar. His drastic work at Santa Croce (1565–84) and Santa Maria Novella (1565–72), Florence, gave the interiors architectural unity, but also removed many medieval features.

Bibliography

• Boase (1979)
• M.Hall (1979)
• Heydenreich (1996)
• Satkowski (1979, 1993)
• Jane Turner (1996)
• Vasari (1912–15)

The full bibliography for this book is available to download as a pdf file.
Download the bibliography for A Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (PDF: 1.2MB)

Vasari, Giorgio (1511–1574), Italian biographer, painter, and architect. Born in the Tuscan town of Arezzo, Giorgio Vasari was brought in his early years to Florence, where he eventually became a prolific painter and highly accomplished architect. As an artist he is best known for his extensive historical and allegorical fresco decorations in the Palazzo Vecchio, made to celebrate the ruler of Florence, Duke Cosimo de' Medici. As an architect his most celebrated building is the Uffizi, the government "offices" built for his Medici patron.

Vasari's art and architecture are eclipsed, however, by his work as a writer. His monumental Lives (commonly known as Lives of the Artists), was first published in Florence in 1550 and was reprinted in a much revised and amplified version in 1568. Composed as a series of biographies, Vasari's book is a history of the progress of art, after its "rebirth," from Cimabue to the perfection of Michelangelo. Considered to be the first "history of art" as such, the Lives powerfully shaped the emergence of art history as a scholarly discipline in the modern era. Vasari's book is also a rich source of information about Renaissance artists and the world in which they worked. It is a valuable font concerning the theory, practice, criticism, and techniques of art.

Given the vast amount of attention Vasari's writing has received, what is still underestimated at this late date is the status of Vasari's book as an enduring masterpiece of imaginative literature and of historical art. Literary scholars have been insufficiently attentive to Vasari's relations to Homer, Ovid, and Virgil, to Dante, Petrarch, and Giovanni Boccaccio, to Politian, Marsilio Ficino, and Ludovico Ariosto, to Baldassare Castiglione, Pietro Bembo, and Pietro Aretino, and art historians are totally indifferent, if not hostile, to the literary virtues of the Lives.

Writing before the modern distinction between scientific history and historical fiction, Vasari produced a book that combined both—fables and novelle on the one hand and "factual documents," as we might call them, on the other. Although scholars have become increasingly attentive to the fictive character of the Lives, they have remained remarkably insensitive to the virtues of such fiction. Sometimes they still ignore or refuse to acknowledge the presence of fiction in Vasari's book, as when, for example, they treat his fable of Leonardo's fabulous buckler or his tale of Michelangelo's smiling faun made in the Medici garden as true stories, as documentation of what really happened. What is lost here is an adequate critical appreciation of Vasari's art, the poetic art and inventiveness of these and other stories.

The blind reading of Vasari, which talks around the fiction of his book or refers to it only as "poetic embellishment" when it is far more than that, is based on the misguided belief that history is an accumulation of facts when it is, in fact, shaped or formed, hence "fictive" in the root sense of the word. Fiction in Vasari is inevitably written in the service of the historical truth. Vasari reports, for example, that Piero di Cosimo was a "wild man," a fiction that is true to the character of the artist's primitive subjects, which are the inventions of a highly cultivated artist. The power of Vasari's fiction is so great that even modern scientific art historians have imagined him as a kind of caveman. Although Piero becomes a fictional character in the pages of Vasari, he is obviously not an invented character. Rather, he is a real person whose life is poetically imagined.

The poetry of Vasari endures in the modern fable of art, in Honoré de Balzac's The Unknown Masterpiece, the tale of a painter whose inability to complete a masterpiece echoes Vasari's portrayal of Leonardo's unfinished work. Vasari is alive in Robert Browning's poems on Fra Filippo Lippi and Andrea del Sarto, and in George Eliot's portrayal of Piero di Cosimo in Romola. The extent of Vasari's influence on the modern imagination is far greater than the provincial historiography of art history allows. Vasari's book is a classic of world literature in which the mythologized Piero di Cosimo, Leonardo, Raphael, and Michelangelo are characters of historical fiction who take their place as the subjects of history and the modern novel alike. Vasari often appropriated materials from other writers, far more than is generally realized; but, in the end, he was the superintending intelligence responsible for the making of a great literary and historical masterpiece, which will forever remain "Vasari's Lives."

Bibliography

Primary Source

Vasari, Giorgio. Le vite de' più eccellenti pittori, scultori et architettori scritte da Giorgio Vasari. Edited by Gaetano Milanesi. 9 vols. Florence, 1906.

Secondary Sources

Barolsky, Paul. Why Mona Lisa Smiles and Other Tales by Vasari. University Park, Pa., 1991.

Rubin, Patricia. Giorgio Vasari: Art and History. New Haven and London, 1995.

—PAUL BAROLSKY

"Vasari" redirects here. For the Italian surname, see Vasari (surname).

Giorgio Vasari
Vasari's self-portrait
Born	30 July 1511(1511-07-30) Arezzo, Tuscany
Died	27 June 1574 (aged 62) Florence, Italy
Nationality	Italian
Field	Painting, architect
Training	Andrea del Sarto
Movement	Renaissance
Works	Biographies of Italian artists

Giorgio Vasari (30 July 1511 – 27 June 1574) was an Italian painter and architect, who is today famous for his biographies of Italian artists, considered the ideological foundation of art-historical writing.

Contents 1 Biography 2 The Lives 3 Competition and "Competition" 4 See also 5 References 6 Gallery 7 External links

Biography

Vasari was born in Arezzo, Tuscany. Recommended at an early age by his cousin Luca Signorelli, he became a pupil of Guglielmo da Marsiglia, a skilful painter of stained glass. Sent to Florence at the age of sixteen by Cardinal Silvio Passerini, he joined the circle of Andrea del Sarto and his pupils Rosso Fiorentino and Jacopo Pontormo where his humanist education was encouraged. He was befriended by Michelangelo whose painting style would influence his own.

In 1529 he visited Rome and studied the works of Raphael and others of the Roman High Renaissance. Vasari's own Mannerist paintings were more admired in his lifetime than afterwards. He was consistently employed by patrons in the Medici family in Florence and Rome, and he worked in Naples, Arezzo and other places. Many of his pictures still exist, the most important being the wall and ceiling paintings in the great Sala di Cosimo I of the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, where he and his assistants were at work from 1555, and his uncompleted frescoes inside the vast cupola of the Duomo, completed by Federico Zuccari and with the help of Giovanni Balducci. He also helped organize the decoration of the Studiolo, now reassembled in the Palazzo Vecchio.

As an architect, Vasari was perhaps more successful than as a painter. His loggia of the Palazzo degli Uffizi by the Arno opens up the vista at the far end of its long narrow courtyard, a unique piece of urban planning that functions as a public piazza, and which, if considered as a short street, is the unique Renaissance street with a unified architectural treatment. The view of the Loggia from the Arno reveals that, with the Vasari Corridor, it is one of very few structures that line the river which are open to the river itself and appear to embrace the riverside environment.

The Vasari Corridor passing over the Ponte Vecchio

In Florence, Vasari also built the long passage, now called Vasari Corridor, which connects the Uffizi with the Palazzo Pitti on the other side of the river. The enclosed corridor passes alongside the River Arno on an arcade, crosses the Ponte Vecchio and winds around the exterior of several buildings.

Vasari also renovated the fine medieval churches of Santa Maria Novella and Santa Croce, from both of which he removed the original rood screen and loft, and remodelled the retro-choir in the Mannerist taste of his time.

In Rome, Vasari worked with Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola and Bartolomeo Ammanati at Pope Julius III's Villa Giulia. Vasari enjoyed high repute during his lifetime and amassed a considerable fortune. In 1547, he built himself a fine house in Arezzo (now a museum honouring him), and laboured to decorate its walls and vaults with paintings. He was elected to the municipal council or priori of his native town, and finally rose to the supreme office of gonfaloniere.

In 1563, he helped found the Florence Accademia e Compagnia delle Arti del Disegno, with the Grand Duke and Michelangelo as capi of the institution and 36 artists chosen as members. Vasari died at Florence on 27 June 1574.

The Lives

Main article: Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects

A cover of the Lives

As the first Italian art historian, he initiated the genre of an encyclopedia of artistic biographies that continues today. Vasari coined the term "Renaissance" (rinascita) in print, though an awareness of the ongoing "rebirth" in the arts had been in the air from the time of Alberti. Vasari's Le Vite delle più eccellenti pittori, scultori, ed architettori (Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects) — dedicated to Grand Duke Cosimo I de' Medici — was first published in 1550. It included a valuable treatise on the technical methods employed in the arts. It was partly rewritten and enlarged in 1568, with the addition of woodcut portraits of artists (some conjectural).

The work has a consistent and notorious bias in favour of Florentines and tends to attribute to them all the developments in Renaissance art — for example, the invention of engraving. Venetian art in particular (along with arts from other parts of Europe), is systematically ignored in the first edition. Between the first and second editions, Vasari visited Venice and while the second edition gave more attention to Venetian art (finally including Titian) it did so without achieving a neutral point of view.

Vasari's biographies are interspersed with amusing gossip. Many of his anecdotes have the ring of truth, while others are inventions or generic fictions, such as the tale of young Giotto painting a fly on the surface of a painting by Cimabue that the older master repeatedly tried to brush away, a genre tale that echoes anecdotes told of the Greek painter Apelles. With a few exceptions, however, Vasari's aesthetic judgement was acute and unbiased. He did not research archives for exact dates, as modern art historians do, and naturally his biographies are most dependable for the painters of his own generation and those of the immediate past. Modern criticism — with new materials opened up by research — has corrected many of his traditional dates and attributions. The work remains a classic, though it must be supplemented by modern critical research.

Vasari includes a sketch of his own biography at the end of his Lives, and adds further details about himself and his family in his lives of Lazzaro Vasari and Francesco Salviati.

Competition and "Competition"

According to the historian Richard Goldthwaite, Vasari was one of the earliest authors to use the word "competition" (or "concorrenza") in Italian in its economic sense. He used it repeatedly, but perhaps most notably while explaining the reasons for Florentine preeminence, in the introduction to his life of Pietro Perugino.

In Vasari's view, Florentine artists excelled because they were hungry, and they were hungry because their fierce competition for commissions each with the others kept them hungry. Competition, he said, is "one of the nourishments that maintain them."

See also

• Accademia delle Arti del Disegno

References

This article includes a list of references, related reading or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks inline citations. Please improve this article by introducing more precise citations where appropriate. (August 2009)

The Castration of Uranus: fresco by Vasari & Cristofano Gherardi (c. 1560, Sala di Cosimo I, Palazzo Vecchio, Florence).

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Giorgio Vasari

This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica, Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.

• The Lives of the Artists Oxford University Press, 1998. ISBN 019283410X
• Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects, Volumes I and II. Everyman's Library, 1996. ISBN 0679451013
• Vasari on Technique. Dover Publications, 1980. ISBN 0-486-20717-X
• Life of Michelangelo. Alba House, 2003. ISBN 0-8189-0935-8
• Biography of Vasari and analysis for four major works
• Brief Vita

Gallery

The Uffizi colonnade and loggia

The Uffizi Loggia seen from the Arno River

The Loggia of Vasari in Arezzo

The painting of the interior of the dome of Florence Cathedral was commenced by Vasari

External links

Copies of Vasari’s Lives of the Artists online:

• “Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists.” Site created by Adrienne DeAngelis. Now largely completed in the posting of the Lives, intended to be re-translated to become the unabridged English version.
• “Le Vite." 1550 Unabridged, original Italian.
• “Stories Of The Italian Artists From Vasari.” Translated by E L Seeley, 1908. Abridged, in English.
• Le Vite - Edizioni Giuntina e Torrentiniana
• Gli artisti principali citati dal Vasari nelle "Vite" (elenco)
• Excerpts from the Vite combined with photos of works mentioned by Vasari.

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